Legend of the birth of Ch'ien Lung—A valley of temples—Wells—A temple fair—Hawking—Suicide's rock—Five hundred and eight Buddhas—The Po-Ta-La—Supercilious elephants—Steep steps—Airless temple—The persevering frog—Bright-roofed Temple—Tea at the Temple of the great Buddha—The Yuan T'iing—Ming Temple outside Peking.

As we walked in the Manchu Park the amah told us a story, a legend, and the missionary translated it to me. It took a long while to tell, first she slipped on the rocky steps and we had to wait till she recovered, then the General's secretary joined us, and finally, when we were safe back at the missionary compound, she had to wait till we got by ourselves, because she thought it was improper!

And this was the story the amah told as we walked beneath the fir-trees.

Once upon a time in the valley of Jehol there was born a little girl who did not speak till she was three years old, then she opened her lips, looked at her grandfather, and called him by name. And her grandfather died. She did not speak again for a long time, but the next person she called by name also died and consternation reigned in the family. Her father and mother died, whether because she spoke to them the amah did not know, but she was left penniless and at last a farmer took compassion upon the girl, now just growing into womanhood, and told her she might have charge of the ducks, on condition she did not speak. So for her began a lonely, silent life among the mountains, herding the ducks.

One night as the dusk was falling and the duck pond and the hills beyond were wrapped in a mysterious haze that hid and glorified everything, there came along an old man riding a donkey and asked her the way to the Hunting Palace of the Manchus that was somewhere among these hills and valleys. He had lost his way, he said, and wanted to get back there. The girl looked at him with mournful eyes and shook her head without saying a word.

“What is your name?” cried the old man.

She turned away silently.

“I must find my way,” he added, and she took up a stick and gathered her ducks together.

“But I am the Emperor,” said he, “and I must get back. What manner of girl are you who will not speak to the Emperor?”

And she looked at him more gravely than ever out of her dark eyes, and drove off her ducks, taking no more notice of the greatest ruler in the world than if he had been a common coolie. So the Emperor found his own way to his Hunting Palace, and that night he dreamed a dream, a vivid dream, that an ancestor had come to him and told him he must marry a strange and mysterious woman.

But the women who came to the ruler of the earth were not strange and mysterious, they were ordinary and commonplace even though he had his choice of the women of his Empire. He brooded over the matter and came to the conclusion that the strange and mysterious woman must be the girl he had met herding ducks in the dusk of the evening. Then he sent out to the part of the country where he had wandered that night and demanded the daughters of the farmer.

The good man was highly honoured and dressed his girls in their finest clothes to appear before their Emperor, but, and they must have been bitterly disappointed, though they were pretty girls, there was nothing strange about them, they were as ordinary as all the other women who occupied, the women's quarters. He had seen many, many, like them. Again he sent back to the farm and they said there were no other women there but the girl who herded the ducks, and it could not be she because she spoke to no one.

“That,” said the Emperor, “is the girl,” and he ordered her to be properly arrayed and brought before him at once.

Alas for the glamour that comes with the dusk of the evening. The girl had grown up without any comeliness and when she was brought before the Emperor he turned away disgusted. Nevertheless, for his dream's sake, he married her and gave her a fine house to live in, but he had nothing to do with her, she was his wife only in name.

And the duck-herd girl, come to high estate, pined because she did not find favour in the sight of her lord, she never ceased to pray for his smiles, and at last she so worked upon him that one night he did send for her. She was his wife, her shame had gone from her. And presently, it was rumoured that the duck-herd girl was to become a mother. But the Emperor was angry, he could not believe the child was his, and he turned Her out to wander, desolate and forlorn, upon the hills. At first she despaired, but presently she took courage, had she not been raised from a duck-herd to an Emperor's wife, and was she not to bear his son, and by her faith in herself she persuaded some shepherds who tended their sheep upon the other side of the valley from the wall that surrounded the Emperor's pleasure-grounds to take her in, and here her son was born.

The drawback for me was that I had to go in a Peking cart, and even though those temples were built by an Emperor I had no reason to suppose that the road that led to them was any better than the ordinary Chinese roads. It wasn't, but I don't know that it was worse. Tuan engaged the old white mule of venerable years, and I think that was an advantage, he went so slowly that often I was able to walk. I did not propose to visit all of them, there is a family likeness between all Chinese temples, whatever be the name of the deity to whom they are dedicated, and seeing too many I should miss the beauty of all.

It was a gorgeous June morning the day I set out, sitting as far forward as I could in the cart with Tuan on the tail of the shaft and the carter walking at the mule's head. All round one side of Cheng Teh Fu is built up a high wall that the Chinese call a breakwater, and a breakwater I believe it is indeed after the summer rains, though then, the Jehol River ran just a shallow trickle at its foot. There were many little vegetable gardens along here, the ground most carefully cultivated and showing not a weed, not a stray blade of grass. “The garden of every peasant contained a well for watering it,” writes Sir George Staunton in 1793, “and the buckets for drawing up the water were made of ozier twigs wattled or plaited, of so close a texture as to hold any fluid.” He might have been writing of the peasants of today. As I passed, with those selfsame buckets were they watering their gardens.

The people were streaming out of the town, most of them on foot, but there were a few fat men and small-footed women on donkeys, and one or two of the richer people, I noticed by the women's dresses they were mostly Manchus, had blossomed out into Peking carts. For there was a fair at one of the temples, a very minor temple; and a fair in China seems to be much what it used to be in England, say one hundred, or one hundred and fifty years ago. It attracts all the country people for miles round. Here they were all clad in blue, save the lamas, who were in bright yellow and dingy red. There were the people who came to worship, followed by the people who came to trade, who must make money out of them, men buying, selling, begging, men and women clad in neat blue cotton, and in the dingiest, dirtiest rags, men gathering the droppings of the mules and donkeys, and—how it made me think of the historical novels I used to love to read in the days when novels fascinated me—gentlemen with hooded hawks upon their wrists. All of them wended their way along this road, this beautiful road, this very, very bad road, and I went along with them, the woman who was not a missionary, who was travelling by herself, and who, consequently, was an object of interest to all, far outrivalling the fair, in attraction. It was a scene peculiarly Chinese, and it will be many a long year before I forget it.

On the left-hand side rose a steep ridge well wooded for China, and on the very top of the ridge ran the encircling wall that shut out all but the favoured few from the pleasure-grounds of the Manchu Sovereigns. Six weeks before, up among these mountains of Inner Mongolia, all the trees were leafless, and on this day in June the leaves of the poplars and aspens, acacias and oaks still retained the delicate, dainty green of early spring, and on the right were the steep, precipitous cliffs overlooking the town. One of these cliffs goes by the sinister name of the “Suicide's Rock.” The Chinese, though we Westerners are accustomed to regard them as impassive, are at bottom an emotional people. They quarrel violently at times, and one way of getting even with an enemy or a man who has wronged them is to dare him to go over the “Suicide's Rock.” To my Western notions it is not quite clear how the offender is scored off, for the challenger must be prepared to accompany the challenged on his dreadful leap. Yet they do it. Three times in the six years the missionaries have been here have a couple gone over the cliff, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

But that sinister cliff was soon passed, and turning a little with the wall we went up a valley, and up that valley for perhaps eight miles, embosomed among the folds of the hills, hills for the most part steep, rounded, and treeless, are the temples, red, and gold, and white, against the green or brown of the hills.

To the glory of God! Surely. Surely. An ideal place for temples whoever placed them there, artist or Emperor, holy man, or grateful son.

“Idols. Idols,” say the missionaries at Jehol sadly, those good, kindly folk, whose life seemed to me an apology for living, a dedication of their whole existence to the austere Deity they have set up. But here I was among other gods.

“We go last first,” said Tuan, and I approved. There would be no fear of my missing something I particularly wanted to see if they were all on my homeward path.

“B-rrr! B-rrr! B-rrr!” cried my “cartee man” encouraging his old mule, and as we went along the road, up the valley, and everywhere in this treeless land, the temples were embowered in groves of trees, sometimes fir-trees, sometimes acacia or white poplar, and always on the road we passed the blue-clad people, and out of the carts peeped the Manchu ladies with highly painted faces and flower-decked hair, till at last we came to a halt under a couple of leafy acacia-trees, by a bridge that had once been planned on noble lines. And bridges are needed here, for the missionaries told me that a very little rain will put this road, that is axle-deep in dust, five feet under water. But the bridge was broken, the stones of the parapet were lying flat on one side; the stones that led up to it were gone altogether. And as the bridge that led up to it so was the temple.

They are all dead these gods in the temples builded by a pious Emperor for his pious mother. The next I visited was a lamaserie, built in imitation of the Po-Ta-La in Lhasa. It climbs up the steep hill-side, story after story, with here and there on the various stages a pine-tree, and the wind whispers among its boughs that the Emperor who built and adorned it is long since dead, the very dynasty has passed away, and the gods are forgotten. Forgotten indeed. I got out of my cart at the bottom of the hill, and the gate opened to me, because the General had sent to say that one day that week a foreign woman was coming and she must have all attention, else I judge I might have waited in vain outside those doors. Inside is rather a gorgeous p'ia lou, flanked on either side by a couple of elephants. I cannot think the man who sculptured them could ever have seen an elephant, he must have done it from description, but he has contrived to put on those beasts such a very supercilious expression it made me smile just to look at them.

From that p'ia lou the monastery rises. Never in my life before have I seen such an effect of sheer steep high walls. I suppose it must be Tibetan, for it is not Chinese as I know the Chinese. Stage after stage it rose up, showing blank walls that once were pinkish red, with square places like windows, but they were not windows, they were evidently put there to catch the eye and deepen the effect of steepness. Stage after stage I climbed up steep and narrow steps that were closed alongside the wall, and Tuan, according to Chinese custom, supported my elbow, as if it were hardly likely I should be capable of taking another step. Also, according to his custom, he had engaged a ragged follower to carry my camera, and a half-naked little boy to bear the burden of the umbrella. I don't suppose I should have said anything under any circumstances, China had taught me my limitations where my servants were concerned, but that day I was glad of his aid, for this Tibetan temple meant to me steep climbing. I have no use for stairs. Stage after stage we went, and on each platform the view became wider, far down the valley I could see, and the hills rose range after range, softly rounded, rugged, fantastic, till they faded away in the far blue distance. I had thought the Nine Dragon Temple wonderful, but now I knew that those men of the Ming era who had built it had never dreamed of the glories of these mountains of Inner Mongolia. I was weary before I came to the last pine-tree, but still there was a great walled, flat-topped building towering far above me, its walls the faded pinkish red, on the edge of its far-away roof a gleam of gold.

The steps were so narrow, so steep, and so rugged, that if I had not been sure that never in my life should I come there again I should have declined to go up them, but I did go up, and at the top we came to a door, a door in the high blind wall that admitted us to a great courtyard with high walls towering all round it and a temple, one of the many temples in this building, in the centre. The temple was crowded with all manner of beautiful things, vases of cloisonné, figures overlaid with gold leaf, hangings of cut silk, the chair of the Dalai Lama in gold and carved lacquer-work, the mule-saddle used by the Emperor Ch'ien Lung, lanterns, incense burners, shrines, all heaped together in what seemed to me the wildest confusion, and everything was more than touched with the finger of decay. All the rich, red lacquer was perished, much of the china and earthenware was broken, the hangings were rotted and torn and ragged, the paint was peeling from stonework and wood, the copper and brass was green with rust. Ichabod! Ichabod! The gods are dead, the great Emperor is but a name.

It was oppressive in there too, for the blank walls towered up four sides square, the bright blue sky was above and the sun was shining beyond, but the mountain breezes for at least one hundred and fifty years have not been able to get in here, and it was hot, close, and airless. Once there were more steps that led up to the very top of the wall, but they are broken and dangerous now, crumbling to ruin, and as far as I could make out from Tuan's imperfect English no one has been up them for many a long day. There was nothing to be done but to go away from this airless temple and make my way down, down to the platform where are its foundations, and thence down, down, by the little plateaux where the pine-trees grow, by the rough and broken paths to the floor of the valley again.

Sightseeing always wearies me. I want to see these places, I want to know what they are like, I want to be in a position to talk about them to people who have also been there—they are the people who are most interested in one's doings—but the actual doing of the sightseeing I always find burdensome. Now having done so much I was tempted to go back and say I had had enough, for the time being, at any rate, but then I remembered I could not indefinitely trespass upon the kindness of my hosts, I must go soon, and I should never, never come back to this valley. Still I was desperately tired and sorely tempted to give up, and then I remembered the two frogs who fell into a pitcher of milk. I don't think Aesop told the story, but he ought to have done so. They swam round and round hopelessly, for there was no possibility of getting out, and one said to the other, “It's no good, we may as well give in. It'll save trouble in the end,” and he curled up his legs and sank to the bottom of the milk and was drowned. But the other frog was made of sterner stuff.

“I think I'll just hustle round a bit,” said he, needless to say he was an American frog, “who knows what may happen.” So he swam round and round, and sure enough when they looked into that pitcher in the morning there he was sitting on a little pat of butter!

I thought of that frog as I sat at the door of the next temple we drove up to, and I, weary and tired and a little cross, had to wait some time, for the priest who had the keys was not there. Of course I had sent no word that I was coming and it was unreasonable of me to expect that the priest should wait from dawn till dark for my arrival. With me waited a little crowd of people, men, women, and children, that gradually grew in numbers, and when the custodian at last arrived it was evident they all intended to take advantage of my presence and go in and see the temple too. I had not the least objection, neither, it seemed, had the priest. They were holiday-makers from the fair, and they probably gave him some small trifle. Tuan decided that we should give eighty cents, roughly about one and eightpence, or forty cents American money. And glad indeed was I that I had waited. Not that the temple differed much inside the courtyard and the sanctuary from the other temples I have seen, all was the same ruin and desolation, only after I had climbed up many steps, roughly made of stones and earth, we came upon a platform from which the roof was visible. The Emperor's Palace, they call this, or the Bright-roofed Temple, and truly it is well-named. Its roof, with dragons running up all four corners, is of bronze covered with gold, and gleams and glitters in the sunshine. Solomon's Temple, in all its glory, could not have been more wonderful, and as I tried to photograph it, though no photograph can give any idea of its beauty, some girls, Manchu by their head-dresses, with flowers in their hair, giggled and pointed, and evidently discussed me. I thought they would come in well—a contrast to that gorgeous roof, but a well-dressed Chinese—not in foreign clothes, I imagine the General's secretary is the only man up among these hills who could indulge in such luxuries, drove them away and then came and apologised, through Tuan, for their behaviour. I said, truly enough, that I did not mind in the least, but he said, as far as I. could make out, that their behaviour was unpardonable, so I am afraid they hadn't admired me, which was unkind, considering I had taken them in.

The next temple, a mass of golden brown and green tiled roofs, looked loveliest of all in its setting, against the hill-side. The roofs, broken and irregular, peeped out from among the firs and pines, and there was a soft melody in the air as we approached, for a wind, a gentle wind had arisen, and every bell hanging at the corners of the many roofs was chiming musically. I do not know any sweeter sound than the sound of those temple bells as the evening falls. This was an extensive place of many courtyards, climbing up the hill like the lamaserie, the Ta Fo Hu they call it or “Great Buddha Temple,” for in one of the temples, swept and garnished better than any temples I had seen before, was a colossal figure seventy feet high with many arms outstretched and an eye in the palm of every hand. It is surely a very debased Buddhism, but I see the symbolism, the hand which bestows and the eye which sees all things. But for all the beauty of the symbolism it was ugly, as all the manifestations of the Deity, as conceived by man, are apt to be. The stone flooring was swept, but the gold is falling from the central figure, the lacquer is perished, the hangings are torn and dust-laden beyond description, and the only things of any beauty are walls which are covered with little niches in which are seated tiny golden Buddhas, hundreds of them. I wanted to buy one but the priests shook their heads, and it would have been a shame to despoil the temple. Even if they had said, “Yes,” I don't know that I would have taken it.

There were many priests here, shaven-headed old men and tiny children in brilliant yellow and purplish red, but they were all as shabby and poverty-stricken as the temple itself. I had tea on one of the many platforms overlooking many roofs, and a young monk made me a seat from the broken yellow tiles that lay on the ground, and the little boy priests looked so eagerly at the cakes I had brought with me—the priests gave me tea—that I gave some to them and they gobbled them up like small boys all the world over. Tuan pointed out to me some dark steps in the wall. If I went up there I should reach the Great Buddha's head; but I shook my head, not even the recollection of the frog who gave up so easily could have made me climb those steps. I am not even sorry now that I didn't.

I was very tired by this time, and very thankful that there was only one more temple to see. There were really eight in all, but I was suffering from a surfeit of temples, only I could not miss this one, for every day when I went for a walk I could see its glorious golden brown tiled roof amid the dark green of the surrounding mountain pines. It was unlike any Chinese roof I have seen, but it is one of the temples of this valley. It is the Yuan T'ing, a temple built by Ch'ien Lung, not for his mother but for a Tibetan wife, after the style of her country, that she might not feel so lonely in a strange land.

Its pinkish red arched walls and gateways seemed quite close, but it was exceedingly difficult to get at, particularly for a tired woman who, when she was not jolting in a Peking cart, had been climbing up more steps than even now she cares to think about. And the temple, save for that roof, was much like every other temple, a place of paved courtyards with the grass and weeds growing up among the stones, and grass and even young pine-trees growing on the tiled roofs. The altars were shabby and decayed, and when I climbed up till I was right under the domed roof—and it was a steep climb—more than once I was tempted to turn back and take it as read, as they do long reports at meetings. I found the round chamber was the roosting-place of many pigeons, all the lacquer was perished, the bronze rusted, and though the attendant opened many doors with many keys, I know that the place is seldom visited, and but for that vivid roof, it must be forgotten.

“She say 'No matter,'” said Tuan including them both in the feminine, “She like to come,” and I think he liked it as well, for they escorted me with subdued enthusiasm round that domed chamber inspecting what must have been a reproduction of a debased Buddhist hell in miniature. It was covered with dust, faded, and weather-worn, like everything else in the temple, but it afforded the four who were with me great pleasure, and when with relief I saw a figure instead of being bitten by a snake, or eaten by some gruesome beast, or sawn asunder between two planks, merely resting in a tree, Tuan explained with great gusto and evident satisfaction: “Spikes in tree.” He took care I should lose none of the flavour of the tortures. But even the tortures were faded and worn, the dust had settled on them, the air and the sun had perished them, and I could not raise a shudder. Dusty and unclean they spoiled for me the beauty of the golden roof and the dark green mountain pines. I was glad to go down the many steps again, glad to go down to the courtyard where the temple attendant, who might have been a priest, but was dressed in blue cotton and had the shaven head and queue that so many of the Manchus still affect, gave me tea out of his tiny cups, seated on the temple steps. A dirty old man he was, but his tea was perfect, and I made up my mind not to look whether the cups were clean, for his manners matched his tea.

And then I went out on to the broad cleared space in front, and feasted my eyes for the last time on the golden brown tiled roof set amongst the green of the pines, and clear-cut against the vivid blue of the sky.

And yet it is not the beauty only that appeals, there is something more than that, for even as I look at those hills, I remember another temple I visited just outside Peking, a little temple, and I went not by myself but with a party of laughing young people. There was nothing beautiful about this temple, the walls were crumbled almost to dust, the roof was falling in, upon the tiles the grasses were growing, the green kaoliang crept up to the forsaken altars, and the dust-laden wind of Northern China swept in through the broken walls and caressed the forgotten gods who still in their places look out serenely on the world beyond.

I could not but remember Swinburne, “Laugh out again for the gods are dead.” Are they dead? Does anything die in China? In the Ming Dynasty, some time in the fifteenth century, when the Wars of the Roses were raging in England they built this little temple, nearly three hundred years before Ch'ien Lung built the temples in the valley at Jehol, and they installed the gods in all the glory of red lacquer and gold, and when the last gold leaf had been laid on and the last touches had been given to the dainty lacquer they walked out and left it, left it to the soft, insidious decay that comes to things forgotten. For it must be remembered, whether we look at this valley of dead gods or this little temple outside Peking, that when a memorial is put up it is not expected to last for ever, and no provision is made or expected for its upkeep. If it last a year, well and good, so was the man to whom it was put up, valued, and if it last a hundred years—if five hundred years after it was dedicated there still remains one stone standing upon the other, how fragrant the memory of that man must have been. It is five hundred years since this temple was built and still it endures. Behind is the wall of the city, grim and grey, but the gods do not look upon the wall, their faces are turned to the south and the gorgeous sunshine. They still sit in their places, but the little figures that once adorned the chamber are lying about on the ground or leaning up disconsolately against the greater gods, and some of them are broken. On the ground, in the dust, was a colossal head with a face that reminded us that the silken robes of Caesar's wife came from China, for that head was never modelled from any Mongolian, dead or alive. A Roman Emperor might have sat for it. The faces that looked down on it, lying there in the dust, were Eastern there were the narrow eyes, the impassive features, the thin lips, but this, this was European, this man had lived and loved, desired and mourned, and, for there was just a touch of scorn on the lips, when he had drained life to its dregs, or renounced its joys, said with bitterness: “All is vanity.”

And the Chinese peasants came and looked at the aliens having tiffin in the shade, and for them our broken meats were a treat. One was crippled and one was blind and one was covered with the sores of smallpox, so hideous to look upon that the lady amongst us who prided herself upon her good looks turned shuddering away and implored that they be driven off, before we all caught the terrible disease.

What could life possibly hold for these people? Surely for them the gods are dead?

I talked with an old woman, dirty and wrinkled, with a bald head and maimed feet.

“She asks how old you are?” translated the young man beside me.

“Tell her I am sixty.” I thought it would sound more respectable.

“A-a-h!” She looked at me a moment. “She says,” he went on translating, “that you have worn better than she has, for she is sixty too. And have you any sons?”

For a moment I hesitated, but I was not going to lose face, what would she think of a woman without sons, so I laid my hand on his arm, and smiled to indicate that he was my son.

“A-a-h!” and she talked and smiled.

“What does she say?” He looked a little shy. “Tell me”

“She says you are to be congratulated,” and indeed he was a fine specimen of manhood. “She says she has three sons.”

Never again shall I visit that valley of temples that lies among the hills of Inner Mongolia, never again, and though, of course, since the days of Marco Polo Europeans have visited it, it is so distant, so difficult to come at that they have not gone in battalions. But those temples in the folds of the hills are beautiful beyond dreaming, and though their glory has gone, still in their decay, with the eternal hills round and behind them, they form a fitting memorial to the man who set them there to the glory of God and for his humble mother's sake.